Mayor Mitch Landrieu to begin tracking New Orleans street flooding

After this weekend's downpour left cars flooded and water lapping into homes across New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Wednesday that his administration will begin tracking localized flooding to guide infrastructure planning and, until improvements are in place, might ease neutral-ground parking restrictions during bad weather.

Michael DeMocker / The Times-PicayuneA young man gets a tow by boat down Soniat Street at South Claiborne Avenue during the flooding Sunday morning. The mayor said tracking flooding in the city help guide the capital planning.

Landrieu said it would make sense to give a break to drivers who park on neutral grounds to gain a few inches of elevation that might protect their vehicles from flooding in the street.

"Generally it's illegal to park on the neutral grounds," the mayor said. "But we ought to be able to get ahead of the issue when bad weather is coming up, send out an alarm earlier rather than later and say, 'Look, it looks like it's going to flood tomorrow so the Department of Public Works (will) stand down on issuing tickets to people on neutral grounds.'

"There are just some things that I think we can do better," he said.

As rain fell Sunday morning, Landrieu's press office issued a statement identifying about 30 locations where street flooding or standing water had been reported and advised residents not to venture out.

Tracking where flooding occurs can help guide the city's capital planning -- and the requests for federal financing that inevitably go with it, Landrieu said Wednesday after presiding over his first meeting as president of the Sewerage & Water Board.

The water board already measures rainfall duration and intensity, which generally point officials to areas of street flooding, a spokesman said. Meanwhile, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control program, or SELA, relies on property-loss claims and other factors to determine the priority of drainage projects that are financed with a mix of federal and local dollars.

"We understand that we only have the capacity to pump so much, but as we're redeveloping the city, we ought to figure out where the flooding is, what the real cause of it is and whether or not we can do more work to encourage citizens to get ahead of that issue," Landrieu said.

"What I want to do is identify exactly where the streets are that flood," he said. "We ought to know this. This is a knowable issue."

Growing up in Broadmoor, one of New Orleans' lowest-lying neighborhoods and home to scores of properties that have flooded repeatedly during routine rainfalls, Landrieu said he has great sympathy for residents who fear losing a car or getting water in a house every time dark clouds gather.

"It's not an acceptable thing," he said.

S&WB Executive Director Marcia St. Martin said the city's drainage system -- with 119 pumps in 24 pump stations that can remove 50,000 cubic feet per second from city streets -- were working at full capacity last weekend. But the system can drain only 1 inch of water during the first hour of a storm, followed by a half-inch in subsequent hours, meaning runoff will back up into streets and yards in heavier rainfall.

Explaining that the drainage network was built to allow several pumps to be shut down for maintenance at any time without interfering with service, St. Martin said the system is operating at 97.2 percent of its design capacity. The system also has a "crossover" feature that redirects excess water from areas where capacity is reduced or overwhelmed to pumps in other parts of town, though the path may be circuitous.

In his role as water board president, Landrieu promised a close working relationship between his administration and the S&WB, adding that he is "very comfortable" with St. Martin's leadership. As for ongoing efforts to restore the city's aging water and sewer system from the crippling affects of Katrina, Landrieu said he wants the system to be able to survive into the next century.

"I'm not interested in just plugging the holes that got blown open when Katrina hit," he said. "We have some age-old problems here that we have to solve."